Sándor Horváth. Children of Communism: Politicizing Youth Revolt in Communist Budapest in the 1960s

Abstract

In May of 1969, the KGB administration in Kyiv, Ukraine, reported to the Soviet state and Communist Party leadership about the dangerous phenomenon of “Americanization” of Soviet youth culture. Beginning with that first KGB report, throughout the 1960s and the 1970s Soviet police complained almost every month about such “American” groups as “hippies” and about the rise of fascism and “neo-Nazism” among Soviet youth. Moreover, the KGB officers blamed not only “capitalist America” but also socialist countries such as Hungary for bringing the “American poison” of the “fascist hippies” to Lviv, Kyiv, and other cities of Soviet Ukraine. As the KGB analysts reported to the Communist Party leadership, the main reason why young people in Soviet Ukraine were “getting on the criminal path” was “their regular listening to foreign anti-Soviet radio broadcasts, their contacts with the foreigners based on ‘fartsovka’ and participation in groups of hippies and punks.” The conclusion of the KGB analysis was that all the Ukrainian followers of the American “hippies and punks” represented a “dangerous category of people with anti-Soviet, anti-social, and massive amoral tendencies.” According to the KGB, the very fact of an emergence of hippies and punks in Soviet Ukraine “had to be appraised as a result of sabotage (diversii) by the ideological centers of our adversary,” the United States of America.1Moreover, the KGB connected these supposed provocations by American ideological centers to two major international political crises in the Soviet Bloc: the phenomenon of “hippies” had a “direct link” to the Prague Spring of 1968 in socialist Czechoslovakia; and a “movement of punks was triggered” by the Solidarity movement in socialist Poland in 1980. In the KGB analysis, these Soviet imitations of the Western youth subcultures were the “products” of ideological and political provocations by the American intelligence centers, which tried to “undermine the socialist society from inside, using various forms of the American mass culture, starting in more Westernized countries of the Warsaw Pact, such as Czechoslovakia and Poland, and then targeting non-Russian republics of the USSR, such as Ukraine.” At the same time, the KGB officers noticed that since the 1960s the cities of socialist countries, such as Budapest in Hungary, had offered behavioral models of Americanization to be imitated by the urban youth of Soviet Ukraine.2In this context, the study of Hungarian youth in the 1960s by Sándor Horváth, presented in a good English translation, is a very timely book, demonstrating why the Soviet political police were worried so much by the “criminal Americanization” that was reaching Soviet youth from socialist Hungary as well. Horváth’s book is an original explanation of the role of “youth revolt” during the 1960s, which became the pattern for social and cultural developments in countries of the Warsaw Pact. Even the beginning of his story, about a group called the Great Tree Gang in July of 1969—presented as an example of the criminalization of proto-hippie culture in Budapest by the police and state media—became a cultural pattern for Soviet Ukraine. On the evening of June 18, 1971, in Chernivtsi, seventeen local hippies, “carrying handmade banners with a portrait of Paul McCartney, one of the leaders of Bitly,” organized a demonstration to celebrate his birthday and completely paralyzed the downtown area. Eventually, after numerous arrests, the KGB prevented a repetition of these public actions, labeling the Ukrainian followers of McCartney as being anti-Soviet criminals.3 For researchers of youth culture in socialist Europe, Horváth’s book will be a good demonstration of the persistence of similar models of the relations between the state and youth in the socialist bloc.On the evening of June 8, 1969, eighty Hungarian teenagers gathered near a massive tree in a main square of Budapest to mourn the untimely death of Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones. The same evening Hungarian police arrested those “imitators of American hippies,” presenting them to the Hungarian public as dangerous hooligans and “fascists.” This case became known in Hungary as the Great Tree Gang or the “Hippie Stroll.” “Using this incident as a touchstone” for his book, Horváth offers “the interconnected topics of Hungarian youth politics, police surveillance of youth, the tabloid press, and the construction of socialist and postsocialist identities” (2). Based on materials from various state archives and personal interviews with the participants and contemporaries of the events, Horváth has written a historical sociology of Hungarian youth politics. His work builds on Stanley Cohen’s concept of “moral panics,” which “implie[s] a periodic tendency toward the identification and scapegoating” of social groups (the youth in his case) “whose habits and pastimes [are] regarded by hegemonic groups as indicative of imminent social breakdown” (6). According to the author, the police and media in socialist Hungary “strove to create a quasi-moral panic regarding youth violence” (7). By casting the Westernized youth as criminals, the ruling regime justified its right to protect other “normal” young people in socialist society from the temptation to adopt the criminal lifestyle of “hippie fascists.” At the same time, Horváth suggests that “the conceptual borders between the East and the West were not merely a kind of ideological Iron Curtain but also elements of a cultural practice that created social identities that mirrored the official opposition between East and West” (9).Engaging the materials of the police investigation of the “Hippie Stroll,” in chapters 1–3 Horváth re-creates the story of youth subculture in 1960s Budapest, showing how the police and media moved away in their representation of Hungarian youth from fashion (and “Americanization”) to images of deviant violent hooligans. In chapters 4–6, the author concentrates on analyzing the repressive role played by the police and the state media in dealing with young people and “protecting” them. The last chapters (7–9) of the book, based on the notebooks/diaries of and interviews with participants in the events, are about the changing identities of Hungarian youth and their gender roles throughout the socialist and post-socialist period. Horváth’s main conclusion is that the Hungarian socialist state used “moral panic” and the criminalization of “youth cultural practices” to justify the existing political regime. To some extent, his conclusions resonate not only with historical memory about “developed socialism,” but with postsocialist realities as well.According to Horváth, the “antifascist ideology” and “antifascist measures” against the young “Americanized” hooligans, like the Great Tree Gang, had “to make people believe that they needed the police to maintain public order, the tabloid press to inform and entertain them, and newly available consumer goods so that they could keep up, as it were, with their neighbors. As people came to accept the institutions of power and indeed even came to use their services, everyday practices became new buttresses of the regime, as they embodied expressions of an acceptance at least of the status quo and of the state’s hold on power” (248).Horváth’s book is a good contribution to the growing field of the studies on the relations between the socialist state and youth culture. Yet despite the inclusion of some recent publications, it still reflects the historiographic situation of 2009 when the original Hungarian monograph was published.4 Horváth completely ignores the numerous publications since 2011 by Juliane Fuerst about Soviet hippies and the socialist state, as well as the work of Gleb Tsipursky about the policing of the Soviet youth culture in the 1960s, of Olga Bertelsen about the KGB control over young Ukrainian intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s in Soviet Ukraine, and, finally, the publications of the author of this review about the personal diaries of young rock-and-roll fans in Soviet Ukraine and about cultural consumption, rock music, religion, and hippies in the city of Dnipropetrovsk in Soviet Ukraine during the Brezhnev era. Moreover, by focusing completely on Budapest, the capital city of socialist Hungary, Horváth ignores the role of provincial cities and towns in the history of youth-state relations. To some extent, he repeats the mistakes of many Western “Sovietologists,” such as Alexei Yurchak, who have constructed their interpretations of the Soviet realities only on material from the capital cities (such as Moscow and Leningrad in the USSR), ignoring the problems of the provincial cities and non-Russian regions of the Soviet geo-political space.Despite these minor critical remarks, Horváth’s book is an important and talented illustration that the policing of youth culture all over the Soviet Bloc countries followed the same logic, and the same “anti-fascist” and “anti-American” scenarios were used to justify the repressive measures of Communist regimes from Hungary to Soviet Ukraine. Moreover, the same discourse is revived now in Putin’s Russia, justifying its aggression against its neighbors, trying to use the tactic of “moral panic” to generate submission and conformity among the Russian population.